The puppies have landed, and are currently getting some downtime. It was kind of hectic, introducing all the dogs to each other and Steve, making sure my scent was all over Ginger and the puppies before the introduction so the others would understand they are part of the pack now, then we had to give Ginger a bath and set up her room, etc., so there wasn’t an opportunity to take any pics but I will have some later on today. I want them to have some QT with mama to get situated and feed, and I don’t want anyone getting overstimulated or the puppies overhandled, so photos will have to wait a bit.
Thurston and Lovey are just adorable and are so teeny tiny they fit in my hand. They are sort of shapeless little blobs that look like half manatee half dog. You just want to burst when you see them.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
Obviously, everyone will need to be fully supervised at all times for the next few weeks, but don’t be surprised if Steve shows a maternal (or at least gender-neutral nurturing) side. Whenever we had kittens around, Keaton always “adopted” them and would start giving them baths, playing with them, etc.
Elizabelle
Definite reader capture.
skyweaver
You’ve got a good heart, John.
Villago Delenda Est
The island theme lives!
JPL
Fun times!
Litlebritdifrnt
I have to say that Lily will be maternal but you will really have to watch Rosie, I wouldn’t put it past her to hurt one of the puppies. I am not saying that Rosie is a bad girl, but JRT’s were born to catch rats, and right now those puppies look alot like rats.
Violet
Awww…puppies! I can’t wait to see the pictures!
Litlebritdifrnt
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
When we adopted Peaches Cueball our boxer took her under his wing and totally took care of her, she was his baby, gawd help any dog or cat who tried to mess with her.
TaMara (BHF)
OMG, cannot wait for the cute pix to be daily updates.Can’t wait to hear how crazy it is going to be at casa de Cole.
Until then, I finally put up a Bixby update…he is not so little anymore.
gussie
Oh my god, Bixby!
mai naem
Dude, we had this discussion already yesterday and the community as a whole came to the decision that you were going to provide video, not just pics. There was to be a set up for donations if you needed funds for tech stuff. This is as bad as the anaconda guy not being eaten up.
Elizabelle
I’m excited to have puppy and Ginger pictures in our future.
Listening to C-Span; Terry McAuliffe’s giving a great state of the commonwealth address.
Among ideas: like your concealed carry permit? You better like paying your child support too.
No idea if the gun legislation would pass our gerrymandered GOP legislature, but that part of the speech probably gave a few folks heartburn.
Back to puppies.
c u n d gulag
You’re a good man, Charlie “John Cole” Brown!
jacy
In a sea of “blargh” and “grrrr” this is definitely “awwwwwww.”
Pogonip
Make sure your other critters can’t get at the puppies unsupervised. Especially Steve. He’s a good hunter, these are little things that make high-pitched squeaks, and “pack” means nothing to a cat. I’d be leery of it meaning much to a dog when confronted with the excitement of little things that squeak. Be very careful. Later on, when you have decided to keep Mom and at least one pup, THEN you can think about getting all the critters together to sing Kumbaya.
Also, think about what to say to the neighbors when they start combining about the animal hoarding…
Violet
@TaMara (BHF): Bixby is so big!
Elizabelle
@Litlebritdifrnt: Great to see you here!
@TaMara (BHF): Bixby’s darling, and good to hear he’s training well and has a mom who realizes he’s still a little guy inside.
Karen in GA
Poodle and puppies! Ghaahhh — SQUEE.
@TaMara (BHF): What a majestic… ghaahhh. SQUEE again.
Yeah, cute makes my IQ plummet.
Pogonip
@TaMara (BHF): Not motivated by food? Are you SURE that animal is a dog?
There are few things cuter than a big dog trying to be a lap dog.
Another Holocene Human
@Elizabelle: Eh, that’s less socialism and more conservadrama.
I don’t have a ton of sympathy for guys who want to make a baby and then dump said baby on the woman to take care of and run out on their responsibilities. Seen it happen, find it contemptible.
But there is just that whiff, no more of a stench, of class warfare in this whole child support drama. For one thing, some of the biggest scofflaws are rich guys who decide they’re bored with family #1 and move on to family #2 or maybe just their “midlife crisis”. (Funny how blue collar guys never have this mythical midlife crisis. The crisis is realizing you make a lot of money and you can buy things and people with money, plus forgetting how hard you (and others) worked to get there, the illusion that “the world” has finally just recognized your merit, a narcissistic fantasy, and so you act like a baby and run with it. The midlife crisis of the blue collar man is a health crisis that threatens his ability to keep working.) But the state doesn’t run these guys down, and if they do try, they get massive pushback. So instead they focus on chasing really, really poor dudes across state lines.
Plus, there’s the whole punitive aspect. Instead of providing assistance to parents that clearly, between the two of them, lack the means to pay for all of their children’s needs, you make this guy with little current or lifetime earning power responsible for the needs of the child, and god forbid he’s a really dumb or impulsive bugger with multiple children, and you take so much out of his check that he can’t even really live, with overtime, and it doesn’t take a smart person to start thinking about how he can beat the system, at least for a while. Cash under the table, flee to another state with a new name. I mean, the richie riches throw tantrums over a 37% MARGINAL tax rate and some of these guys have judgments that want over half their income (sometimes this isn’t by design, there’s just an income drop and it takes months to straighten that shit out) and that’s not counting what kind of credit card and car debt they might be in.
Then you have the state hounding guys who missed payments because recession and shit like that.
Then you have states where the child support office “lost” payments but the judges don’t believe it.
I met a woman who was getting hauled into family court because of child support SHE owed … but she didn’t, the ex never paid all of his child support, the kid was grown, fortunately she got it straightened out in one day of court.;
Then you have custodial parents who are greedheads, sadists, and scumbags, but does the state give a shit? Of course not, as long as blood is extracted from the turnip, the crushing of the poor under the bootheel of the state continues apace. Who gives a shit about the physical and emotional needs of poor children?
So back to the gun thing, some working class men do supplant their family’s diet with deer meat. They work seasonal jobs, or work and quit. Sure hunting has turned disneyfied with expensivo gear but you can kill a deer with a 100yr old rifle and a beatup truck and a bowie knife. One of my neighbors had venison for months because a nuisance deer came into her back yard and was tearing shit up. Boom! Sausage for everyone!
This guy owes back child support and now you take away the supplemental protein provider device?
Conservadems are pieces of shit.
Pogonip
Now that I’ve issued all the necessary cautions–yay, puppies!
Also, I meant neighbors complaining, not combining. FY Autocorrect. Although they might combine to complain.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Another Holocene Human: What does deer hunting have to do with concealed carry permits?
Anne Laurie
Don’t forget to give Lily & Rosy some extra snuggles, too, John!
(Not because you don’t trust them, just because you don’t want them to be SAD.)
@TaMara (BHF): Bixby is adorable — he’s really starting to look like one of the dogs in the medieval tapestries, but his eyes say “teenage puppy“.
catclub
@Karen in GA: The xkcd thread is two down.
http://xkcd.com/231/
Corner Stone
@Another Holocene Human: Good God. You can drop a multi paragraph wet blanket on just about any thread.
MikeInSewickley
@skyweaver: What SkyWeaver Said.
With all the pain and horror in the world, thanks for this little bit of happiness and love. We need it…badly.
Violet
@Corner Stone: Yeah, I was gonna say. This is a thread about puppies. It takes work to bring that down. Puppies!
dance around in your bones
When we had that tiny chihuahua we used to leave him in the cabover camper that was our home in Baja.In said abode was also our rather large German shepherd mix and we used to come back rather tentatively, expecting to find a tiny bloody lil body in the camper. Never did,tho!! Both dogs got along just fine, even confined to a ridiculously small space – oh, and later on after my cat rescue (+ 4 litters of kittens later!) All the cats and dogs got along smoothly. I miss those days!!
Anne Laurie
@Another Holocene Human:
There’s a lot of truth in your rant, but “concealed carry” is not for deer rifles (or hunting bows). Concealed-carry licenses are mostly for suburban Erick Erickson types who need their
penis extension“protection” available at all times, especially when bragging to their fellow wannabe Big Men about how many “dirtbags” they’ve had to “warn off” from thieving their many many valuable possessions. It’s a good toy to threaten, unlike a contracting or drivers license, and in my experience it does work to keep selfish glibertarians with short attention spans from “forgetting” they still have a responsibility to those kids they bred even months & years after the event.Violet
@dance around in your bones: How goes the recovery?
dance around in your bones
@Violet: Slow but steady! I’m thankful for BJ keeping me amused during this rather boring time ……. thanks, Violet! And the commentariat!!
Just Some Fuckhead
I just squeed all over myself.
dance around in your bones
Slow but steady, thanks ;)
I’m ever so thankful I can read BJ on my kindle and giggle away undisturbed (most likely folks just think I’m a loon).
dance around in your bones
@Violet
: My previous two replies to you just got sucked into some black hole, so I’ll just say ‘Slow, but steady’ and admit that if it wasn’t,t for Balloon Juice I’d be in a loony bin by now.
Violet
@dance around in your bones: Balloon-Juice is very diverting at times, isn’t it? Glad we can help ease your recovery. John’s new puppies should help too, once he gets the photos and video going.
Violet
@dance around in your bones: I see three replies now! Must be a FYWP belch.
dance around in your bones
No kidding!! Just came back to add a FYWP to the mix!!
gogol's wife
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Clean that up.
Pogonip
@Anne Laurie: I think in some states it’s legal to hunt deer with a large-caliber pistol, but I don’t know anyone who’s been fool enough to try it. You hunt deer because you want to, well, bring home a deer, and pistols are too iffy to trust.
Many years ago there was a stray cat in our woods that might have had rabies; my dad put it down with a .22 rifle. I think there are very few animal-killing needs for pistols, except the occasional oddball emergency like a Cujo attack. (I admit that when I read Cujo I did not find it believable, because no rural woman I ever know would drive an unreliable car with a child in it out to the middle of nowhere without telling somebody, and if she did have to for some reason, she’d darn well take a gun. Mean, if not rabid, dogs are not exactly rare out in the sticks and a warning shot is sometimes needed to scare them away. Even then, it’s vanishingly unlikely you’d shoot to kill it with a pistol.)
Pogonip
@dance around in your bones: From what I have seen of chihuahuas, you’re lucky the chihuahua didn’t eat the shepherd. They’re vicious little critters. EXCEPT (to save him from the trouble of typing a long angry reply) the one belonging to the guy who wrote in the other day defending his chihuahua. His is a good dog; I hope they live long and happily together.
FlyingToaster
@Pogonip: Yeah, most of the pistol use I recall growing up in Missouri was for shooting gophers; and that was people who did target shooting with their pistols. I don’t believe that gophers are good eating (nor racoons, nor skunks, nor other varmints). And in the city (where I lived), you were better off calling the equivalent of Billy the Exterminator; they’d trap your varmint(s) and take them somewhere like Marais des Cygnes, never to be heard from again.
If you wanted a deer, you used a rifle, and you didn’t fire it in the city limits.
It really gripes me when people claim they’re using pistols for hunting.
dance around in your bones
@Pogonip: Unfortunately, chihuahua is but a splat on the ‘free road’ now. Come to think of it, big German shepherd is in a very large hole in our old backyard, surrounded by all her favorite toys. Old age took her, miraculously the night before we had a vet coming to our house to give her “the shot”.
She was a great dog, travelled all over with us and showed a special howling fondness for NYC – the city of many sirens, lol.
PurpleGirl
Am eagerly awaiting puppeh pictures.
JC, you should get a playpen for the mom dog and babies. The pet ones have zippered tops and you can leave the little family in it safely. Cat people put in litter boxes but you could put doggie pads inside for Ginger.
Cassie, of Cassie’s Kitten Kastle rescue and shelter, uses playpens in her home when she has different groups of kitten families. Each kitten family gets its own playpen and each momcat is happy.
dance around in your bones
@Pogonip: P.S. Pogonip (because I love your comments ;) Our chihuahua was awesome (something I certainly never expected!) – I’d never liked Yap Yap kind of dogs, either…..but this lil guy defied all preconceptions!!
Pogonip
@FlyingToaster: Oh, it’s possible. Just dumb. My dad used to run the pistol instruction program at Fort Hood–and even he never hunted with a pistol, and I doubt it ever occurred to him to try. It’d be silly.
rikyrah
I’m with others, Cole.
You have been played.
Not ONE of them is going anywhere.
They’re HOME.
Pogonip
@dance around in your bones: Thank you! I love yours too! I hope the guy who stuck up for his chihuahua sees it.
I would experiment by getting my own chihuahua and seeing how it turns out–but my little boy is six-four, weighs 270, and is somewhat absent-minded, so having an itty-bitty dog on the sofa might not work out well.
rikyrah
MEDIA ALERT:
OWN Network tonight
Oprah Winfrey Presents: Legends that Paved the way
Honoring Civil Rights Pioneers
9pm EST
WereBear
So I must have missed the discussion of our esteemed bloghost & dam fostering a momma dog and puppies?
Not that the outcome was in doubt…
Pogonip
@rikyrah: Yes, but does the show have puppies?
raven
NE-Colts thread pleeze.
Pogonip
No puppies, no peas!
Southern Beale
Puppies are so much fucking work.
Willie, my new puppeh, is doign well but he eats his own poop. I think I FINALLY got him over that. I hope so.
Watch out for poop-eating puppehs. They SUCK.
dance around in your bones
@Pogonip: I support whirled peas, doncha know ;)
PurpleGirl
@WereBear: His sister, Devon, talked him into fostering a momdog (Ginger) and her two puppehs (Thurston and Lovely). They are something like 10 days old. He first posted about it on Friday and then yesterday. We’ve been waiting for the post that the puppehs had arrived at Chez Cole.
Pogonip
@WereBear: His sister asked him to “foster” Mom and pups. I’m sure Sis knows darn well that the mother, at least, isn’t going anywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if he keeps at least one puppy, too. As cute as they are, it would be hard not to.
Pogonip
@Southern Beale: You must have missed the person who wrote in the other day. His (?) cat takes a medicine that makes its poop super-tasty; his dog doesn’t even wait for it to land in the litter box. As soon as the cat starts to go, the dog is there. So far as I know, the only ways to get a dog to stop eating poop are to sew its lips shut or to give it that special food that makes the poop taste funny. Don’t know any owners who’ve tried the food so I can’t tell you how well it may work. Most people just try not to think about it.
Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen always made sure his huskies could get at the latrine; that way his party never had to dig more than one per seasonal camp, because the dogs kept it from filling up.
satby
@Pogonip: Honestly, when you foster puppies, it’s not that hard to hand them off to a wonderful adoptive family. Because they are a lot of work, adorable as they are.
The older dogs like Ginger though… the foster gets stuck with them lots of times. that’s how I ended up with 12 animals. Once they had been with me for a year, I always kept them, because no one else had wanted them and they thought they already found their home. Who was I to say they hadn’t?
Besides, I loved the buggers.
satby
@Pogonip: Sigh.
I could have spent the rest of my life happily NOT knowing this.
Pogonip
@satby: Awww. That’s sweet.
When Mom sold a puppy, after the new owners left, she’d cry. We’d have probably ended up with several generations of poodles, oodles of poodles, if my dad did not strongly disapprove of keeping animals in the house. He agreed to Fuzzy, the original poodle, only on grounds that there be no further colonization. ( Although he sure was quiet for several days after she died.)
Pogonip
It’s been about 2 1/2 hours; why are there no puppy pictures yet? This is unacceptable. Are we going to have to outsource this site to China? The stockholders demand puppy pictures!
Elizabelle
@Pogonip: That’s a sweet story about how quiet your dad got.
They do that.
Pogonip
@satby: There’ve been several topics about poop-eating dogs here–this is a really shitty site–and now, even now, let any of us pick up a puppy and we’ll let it lick our face. And I bet the same was true of Roald Amundsen.
muddy
@Pogonip: My sister was saying something about fecal transplants last week and I said I had probably had one from the dog already. I will say that my immune system is very robust!
PurpleGirl
@Pogonip: I used to let Hugo, the Doberman pinscher, lick my face. (Doggie kisses!!!!) One friend didn’t understand how I could do that… Wasn’t his mouth full of germs, she’d ask, is that sanitary… But Hugo liked to do that and he wanted to show me how much he liked me…
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@PurpleGirl:
I work with several germophobes and one of them says she gets grossed out when her cat touches her face with its paws because it digs around in its litter box. I keep trying to tell her that it’s okay because the cat licks its paws clean after using the litter box, but I always bust out laughing halfway through.
Pogonip
@muddy: Yup. In his infinite wisdom, the Lord created dogs because he knew that one day there would be helicopter parents whose kids would never have a chance to develop their immune systems until those kids, as kids do, wanted a puppy.
(I wonder, are there any helicopter parents with large families? It’s normal to do some helicoptering with the first, boiling the pacifier when the baby drops it on the floor, but usually with #2 people only boil the pacifier if the dog gets it, and from #3 onward when the dog gets the pacifier they just rinse it off, maybe, if they’re not too tired.)
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@TaMara (BHF): He’s not so little any more, but he is even more adorable. Has he been introduced to a gentle leader for heel work? That could be a video, for a minute or two.
Our 85 pound mutt objected at first, as so many do. Like a weanling introduced to a halter, she threw herself to the ground and writhed; she tried to rub it off off the ground or pull it off with her
hoovespaws; she rolled some more, and then she gave up and all was fine. M. Q had suggested he introduce her to it, and I cackled. I suggested that I was rather more qualified, having introduced foals of assorted sizes to halters. He understood once he watched the show.Please keep linking us to Bixby.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Tag close fail. ^
@TaMara (BHF): He’s not so little any more, but he is even more adorable. Has he been introduced to a gentle leader for heel work? That could be a video, for a minute or two.
Our 85 pound mutt objected at first, as so many do. Like a weanling introduced to a halter, she threw herself to the ground and writhed; she tried to rub it off off the ground or pull it off with her
hoovespaws; she rolled some more, and then she gave up and all was fine. M. Q had suggested he introduce her to it, and I cackled. I suggested that I was rather more qualified, having introduced foals of assorted sizes to halters. He understood once he watched the show.Please keep linking us to Bixby.
JR in WV
At least there was suspense at the GB-Sea. game. Overtime and all.
45-7 is just sad.
kc
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Cause we know what ELSE the cat licks clean. :)